Shakespeare's Compassion: Emotion and the Classics on the Early Modern Stage

This book shows that Shakespeare's dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, stages a conflicted emotion available to be solicited, manipulated and at times even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others.

Drawing on the history of emotions and on Shakespearean classical studies, Anne Sophie Refskou argues both that Shakespeare's compassion expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his clo...